All They Will Call You Will Be Deportees

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On the morning of February 27, 1948, a plane traveling from Oakland to the Mexican border crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California, about an hour southwest from Fresno. All 32 people on board died that day. Twenty-eight of them were Mexican farmworkers who were in the United States because of the Bracero Program.

All the people on the plane died the same way, but in death, they were not treated the same. For the four American crew members, U.S. officials gathered what remains they could, and sent caskets to their families. The remains of the 28 Mexican braceros were not sent back to Mexico to be repatriated or given proper burial by their families. Instead, they were buried in a mass grave under a tiny plaque that read only “28 Mexican citizens who died in an airplane accident near Coalinga.” Even the media that reported the accident referred to the 28 Mexicans only as “deportees.”

These migrant workers were invisible in life and nameless in death.

But now, 70 years later, the world finally knows who they were, and their stories are being told in a book called All They Will Call You by Mexican-American author Tim Hernandez. We follow Tim’s 7-year journey to shed light on this incident—a journey that all started with a Woody Guthrie song.